Monthly Archives: June 2015

It’s the opposite of an exit interview, in which you try to determine the factors that led to a worker’s decision to leave your employ. Ideally this type of preemptive measure will cut down on the number of talented employees lost.

A stay interview, conducted periodically, is distinct from a performance review. Its basic goal is to determine why the employee continues to work for you, so that you can, within reason, keep those factors alive.

At first glance, Uber’s most recent troubles in France look like an especially violent case of a hidebound country’s reaction to technological disruption. I, too, was once tempted to see Uber’s legal problems in Europe in that light.

Now, I think there’s a valid reason for the French government to resist the spread of Uber. The company is not doing enough to convince governments or the European public that it isn’t a scam.

Uber’s troubles have been particularly acute in France. Last week, licensed taxi drivers blocked roads and airports, burned tires and trashed cars. Previously, President Francois Hollande demanded that the company’s UberPop service be “dissolved” and its vehicles seized. On Monday, police detained two of Uber’s top executives in the country for questioning. Thibaud Simphal, the company’s director general for France, and Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty, its director for Western Europe, will have to appear in court in September to answer charges of fraud and illegal activity.

Fast-food restaurants in New York may soon be increasing employee pay – even if the statewide minimum wage doesn’t increase.

On Monday, a panel organized by the New York state government to study fast-food wages revealed plans to recommend a substantial increase in worker pay to the state’s Department of Labor.

The three members of the panel said research and public meetings led them to conclude that a change is necessary, though they are not yet prepared to make a full recommendation to the State Labor Department. Possible ideas suggested include raising minimum wage for fast-food workers to $15 an hour and creating a higher minimum wage for part-time workers to incentivize the hiring of full-time employees, reports the New York Daily News.

Entrepreneurship is a process and not a goal; a journey, not a destination. Being a successful owner requires you to think about the future and manage the present at the same time. It means you need to take concrete steps to secure that future as early as possible while being willing to change your plans as opportunity dictates.

One of the first things you need is a plan. You should take the time to develop a formal business plan with realistic financial projections, but any plan that maps out your objectives and gives you a way to measure your progress toward them is better than no plan. Just as it’s difficult to build a house without blueprints, it’s even harder jumping into business without an idea of where you want to end up. The beautiful thing about plans is you can fix them if they’re not working. Without a plan, you’ll be left wondering what happened.

In 1776, whether you were declaring America independent from the crown or swearing your loyalty to King George III, your pronunciation would have been much the same. At that time, American and British accents hadn’t yet diverged. What’s surprising, though, is that Hollywood costume dramas get it all wrong: The Patriots and the Redcoats spoke with accents that were much closer to the contemporary American accent than to the Queen’s English.

It is the standard British accent that has drastically changed in the past two centuries, while the typical American accent has changed only subtly.

Traditional English, whether spoken in the British Isles or the American colonies, was largely “rhotic.” Rhotic speakers pronounce the “R” sound in such words as “hard” and “winter,” while non-rhotic speakers do not. Today, however, non-rhotic speech is common throughout most of Britain. For example, most modern Brits would tell you it’s been a “hahd wintuh.”

The past few years have seen an opportunistic and favorable business environment and it looks like thankfully it is poised to continue.

Here are the advantages of being a small business owner … now.

Technology Tools

In no other time has technology made it easier for us to do business, communicate and grow on such an efficient and far reaching scale. The Web, email marketing, social media, plug-ins and apps allow us to organize and focus communication. and to help people in ways that save us time and energy and improve efficiency.

The cloud offers front end management of tasks, while many small service companies still juggle paper spreadsheets and calendars to stay organized.

Nobody is perfect. Everyone makes mistakes, and anyone can fail — especially in the business world.

IBM’s “2015 Cost of Data Breach Study” shows that the average total cost of a data breach is $3.8 million, representing a 23 percent increase since 2013. The cost for each lost or stolen record increased 6 percent, from a consolidated average of $145 to $154.

Several companies also have been sued for their negligence in preventing these attacks. Data breaches are huge failures, but taking a look at these four big ones can teach us a thing or two about how to better secure our data.

Banner ads are pretty much the bane of every digital consumer’s existence. So, it’s no small measure that Red Robin just launched—through a partnership with Google—an interactive display campaign that could actually turn sci-fi fans into patrons of the fast-casual burger chain.

The brand worked with Google and its digital agency, Vitro, to create immersive video promos for Red Robin’s Terminator Genisys campaign, which also includes TV spots and signage in the company’s restaurants. The ads let viewers see Red Robin pitchwoman “Melanie” as a Terminator character would. They can use their smartphones to add another digital layer to the experience or watch on their desktops for a simpler view.

Check out the demo below to better understand the marketer’s take on Terminator:

Twitter acquired MoPub, a mobile app ad network, ad server, and real-time bidding exchange, for $350 million in stock back in 2013.

MoPub has around 5,000 apps on its platform, and it works with publishers and developers to help sell ads within their apps, by plugging into a network of around 150 demand-side platforms (DSPs,) one of which is Twitter. Last year one analyst predicted MoPub will bring in more than $500 million in annual revenue by 2017, up from an estimated $56 million in 2014.

Yet MoPub is still one of Twitter’s best-kept secrets. The company doesn’t break out revenues from MoPub in its earnings report (it sits in the “data licensing and other category,” which generated revenues of $147 million in 2014,) and it rarely releases news from the division, beyond quarterly marketplace reports about trends within the mobile app ecosystem, and a few other updates.

Today’s taxi driver protest is getting out of hand. According to the police, 2,800 taxi drivers are protesting today against UberPOP, the European equivalent of UberX. With UberPOP, everybody can become an Uber driver — taxi drivers see the service as unfair competition as they have to get a special license. Yet, this doesn’t really explain why cabbies are now attacking Uber drivers, burning and breaking their cars.

The police have already arrested a taxi driver and an Uber driver. The cabbie was throwing projectiles toward the police, while the latter was attacking a cabbie. It is currently very difficult to go to Charles-De-Gaulle and Orly airports as taxi drivers are blocking the roads. Taxis are also controlling many parts of Paris, looking for Uber drivers.

There are other protests happening right now in Nice, Marseille, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Lyon and Lille. It’s the biggest protest so far against the urban transportation company in France as UberPOP has been expanding to new French cities.